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Weekend DYI- Roasting Coffee Beans

We recently started roasting our own coffee beans because Louis discovered a wholesale coffee shop called Sweet Maria’s located in Oakland, California. It turns out roasting your own coffee beans at home is very easy, it only takes about 15-30 minutes per batch and the taste is amazing! The roasting process has taught us so much about different varieties of coffees, the roasting techniques and ways of coffee trading.

Our roasting set up. We purchased a digital thermometer on Amazon to provide more accurate temperature gauging.

To start roasting our own coffee, all we needed were green coffee beans, a roaster (we just used a simple popcorn air popper), and some mason jars to store the cooled beans. We purchased 8 lbs of the variety pack of green coffee beans and a popcorn air popper from Sweet Maria’s. You can buy the popcorn air popper from stores like Walmart or Target for cheaper (we did this later with our second air popper) but Louis stumbled upon a good package deal for 8 lbs of green beans with the air popper for $40.

The big question came down to how did the self-roast coffees taste compared to the store bought coffees? It turns out the store bought roasts are typically a very dark, also called french or vienna roast, which a lot of times translate to essentially burnt coffee beans. The beauty of roasting your own coffee is you can control the roast before it gets too dark to actually taste the characteristics of the beans. Additionally, with the variety pack, we’ve had the opportunity to taste many different varieties of coffee all around the world at a fraction of the cost! We definitely enjoy the self roast beans much better than the store bought beans and will continue to roast our own coffee beans in the future!